POETRY FROM PARADISE VALLEY

POETRY FROM PARADISE VALLEY web page

Pecan Grove Press has released an anthology of poems, a sampling of works published in Valparaiso Poetry Review during its first decade, from the original 1999-2000 volume to the 2009-2010 volume.

Poetry from Paradise Valley includes a stellar roster of 50 poets. Among the contributors are a former Poet Laureate of the United States, a winner of the Griffin International Prize, two Pulitzer Prize winners, two National Book Award winners, two National Book Critics Circle winners, six finalists for the National Book Award, four finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award, two finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, and a few dozen recipients of other honors, such as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, etc.

Best Books of Indiana 2011: Finalist. Judges' Citation: "Poetry from Paradise Valley is an excellent anthology that features world-class poetry, including the work of many artists from the Midwest, such as Jared Carter, Annie Finch, David Baker, and Allison Joseph. It’s an eclectic and always interesting collection where poems on similar themes flow into each other. It showcases the highest caliber of U. S. poetry." —Indiana Center for the Book, Indiana State Library

Thursday, February 22, 2007

Charles Simic: MY NOISELESS ENTOURAGE

Readers who have followed Charles Simic’s poetry since his first small press collection four decades ago (What the Grass Says: Kayak, 1967) or his initial publication from a larger press (Dismantling the Silence: Brazillier, 1971) have never really been surprised by the direction his poetry has taken. Likewise, one would immediately recognize the work in his latest book, My Noiseless Entourage, as identifiably Simic’s. With the possible exception of his endeavors in prose poetry, Simic’s distinctive distanced voice rendered in brief and crisply lined poems presenting odd or surrealistic perspectives with an ironic edge to them are easily known by sight.

Nevertheless, despite encountering an expected approach again in his new poems, readers are rarely disappointed due to any onset of predictability or boredom. In fact, sometimes it seems Simic’s return to his familiar formal mannerism or distinguishable subject matter adequately masks the atypical results one finds by the end of each poem. Consequently, while his style might lull us or, like a magician’s diversionary tactic, distract us for a moment while the language’s sleight-of-hand shift in focus occurs, by the close of the poem we discover another unforeseen, though often ambiguous, disclosure that could disturb or unsettle us.

Occasionally, the speakers’ plain diction and apparently flat declarative sentences in Simic’s poems open him to legitimate criticism, as in the opening poem, “Description of a Lost Thing”: “Horror movies, / All-night cafeterias, / Dark barrooms / And poolhalls, / On rain-slicked streets.” However, at times these scenes and their speakers remind me of the ordinary events or everyday unsuspecting individuals inexplicably caught up in extraordinary scenarios and dramatic activities in an Alfred Hitchcock film. In “Pigeons at Dawn,” the book’s final piece, Simic describes such a scene: “Under the vast, early-dawn sky / The city lay silent before us. / Everything on hold: / Rooftops and water towers, / Clouds and wisps of white smoke.” As with Hitchcock’s innocent characters that find themselves in the middle of unusual circumstances, the speakers in Simic’s poems almost appear unaware of the startling consequences of their actions or the substantial significance of their words.

During the book’s title poem, the persona reports: “It was disconcerting, downright frightening / To be reminded of one’s solitude.” No other poet portrays anxiety so gracefully. In “To Dreams,” Simic’s speaker moves through a series of uneasy scenes: “On the hush-hush sharing my bed / With phantoms, visiting the kitchen // After midnight to check the faucet. / I’m late for school, and when I get there / No one seems to recognize me.” Phantoms, ghosts, the dead, and the absent haunt the pages in this book, perhaps as a “noiseless entourage,” while Simic continues to contemplate mortality and the existence or absence of God.

Within “My Noiseless Entourage” Simic makes a comparison to “reading about stars” in “a children’s book”: “How they can afford to spend centuries / Traveling our way on a glint of light.” The poet controls the language of his speakers so much that at first the words often camouflage deeper meanings and, like the far stars, delay enlightenment until after careful consideration of choices between alternative readings. In “Shading Exercise” the speaker concludes: “The sun doesn’t care for ambiguities, / But I do. I open my door and let them in.”

In an essay (“Negative Capability and Its Children”) Simic had written nearly three decades ago, he discussed “the principle of uncertainty,” determining that the best poetry is that which presents “a new and unofficial view of our human condition,” as well as “its contradictions.” Simic suggested the task of the poet was to offer readers ways “to think without recourse to abstractions . . . to sensitize thought and involve it with the ambiguity of existence.” In the best pieces from this collection, Simic still delivers just such poetry, extended metaphors and short narrative allegories especially relating to his aging characters, facing death or contemplating the possibility of God.

Poem after poem, Simic’s personae are surrounded by evidence of death or abandonment. In “Used Clothing Store” one comes upon the “large stock of past lives / To rummage through” until “you turn to flee, / Dead men’s hats are rolling / On the floor, hurrying / To escort you out the door.” “The Centuries” opens with a pair of ominous lines: “Many a poor wretch left no trace / Of ever having lived here.” However, even when a trace of one’s life remains, it also serves to remind us of an absence, a life lost: “A dead man writes of his happy childhood on a farm. / Of riding in a balloon over Lake Erie” (“Used Book Store”). In “Graveyard on a Hill” Simic accepts an image that diverts attention and allows temporary avoidance of considering the dead: “I’ll take the January wind, so mean / It permits no other thought / Than the one that acknowledges its presence / Among these weedy tombstones.”

Simic’s wit shows as he begins a motif in “Ask Your Astrologer”: “My stars have been guilty of benign neglect.” He then presents an address: “To our Lord who has withdrawn / Into a corner with his wounds / I say, that world out there / Is a riddle even you can’t solve.” With the opening line of “To Fate” he reveals: “You were always more real to me than God.” By the final section of the four in My Noiseless Entourage, Simic narrows his focus more closely on the existence or, more precisely, the absence of God (“The Absentee Landlord”). Through metaphor Simic further proposes a God either unresponsive to humans (“He Heard with His Dead Ear”) or now unavailable, like “Our Old Neighbor”: “Who hasn’t been seen in his yard / Or sitting on his front porch / For what seems like forever. / Whose house stays dark at night, / The garage closed, the great / Hearse of a car parked in the back.”

Although one’s instinct sometimes leads to a regret at re-occurrence of the cool or reserved tone in a number of these poems or an apparent lack of range in these works, and some readers may desire greater emotional attachment in Simic’s poetry, while others might seek more substantive exploration of the larger complex subjects this poet only hints at addressing in his brief pieces, these valid concerns also may serve merely as reminders of what defines his style of writing or what borders he is willing to observe. In addition, a few poems in the collection, “Minds Roaming” or “One Chair” among them, seem much too slight to carry any sufficient weight, as though Simic were experimenting in further minimalism and testing the boundaries, sometimes unsuccessfully, of his succinct poetry.

Still, as Charles Simic has demonstrated since his first collection forty years ago, and as he indicated in his early essay, even within these admittedly evident limitations, the poet intends to prove he can offer a new “view of our human condition” and “a principle of uncertainty.” He hopes to show he may be able to relay aspects of ambitious and abstract concepts—including thoughts on mortality and the existence of God—through common, even humorous, settings that have been heightened by application of playful imagination or through engagement in ironic wordplay with an intelligent and witty use of language. Finally, as with the speaker in “Shading Exercise” that Simic mimics in his poetry—and unlike the sun shining brightly on the exterior world, not caring for ambiguities—this poet prefers the darker interior, would rather open his door to the ambiguities and the uncertainties, inviting all of us to enter as well.

Dark Refuge (Whale Sound, 2011)

Click Image for Audio Chapbook

Recent Release

DARK REFUGE

Dark Refuge, a sequence of poems in an audio chapbook and online text, is now available for free, as well as an mp3 recording, e-book copy, and pdf file of the poetry. A print edition of the book and a cd may also be ordered.

SEEDED LIGHT (Turning Point, 2010)

Best Books of Indiana 2011: Finalist. Judges' Citation:"As the title implies, [Seeded Light] includes many poems where nature plays an important part. An emphasis on human relationships intertwines with natural description to give these poems philosophical and emotional depths. Byrne brings to life an old family farm gone fallow, a visit to an inn where the speaker spent his honeymoon, and Lester Young playing tenor sax." —Indiana Center for the Book, Indiana State Library

" ... is memorial and social, scenic and intimate ..."—David Baker

" ... offers abundant evidence of a mind’s alertness to the world of nature and to modern urban reality ..."—Alfred Corn

"... as mysterious and elusive as the permutations of light and shadow for which Byrne has such a canny eye ... subtly virtuosic displays of rhyme, alliteration, and assonance ..."—Frank WilsonThe Philadelphia Inquirer

"Rich, shaded, and subtle in texture, with second lines often bleeding into the next couplet, these open couplets expand meaning, encouraging the reader to follow."—Zara RaabPoemeleon

"... there is always light, from the slimmest of glimmers to full moony illumination, and it is that light, seeded throughout, that we will remember, long after we close the pages and turn off the lamp."—Barbara CrookerRattle

"The liveliness of any art, Byrne implicitly and convincingly argues, depends on union of emotion and intellect, design and accident."—Lesley WheelerThe Adirondack Review

“These poems take readers on very human journeys through translucent landscapes where the world is in some way in balance, or in touch, with what we are. They especially lend themselves to meditative reading, and their gift is a sense of deepened understanding of and participation in the natural world.”—Janet McCannYanaguana Literary Review

"What makes Byrne's poems memorable is his control of plain language that serves as a guiding light."—JL KatoTipton Poetry Journal

ORDER NUMBERED & SIGNED COPIES OF SEEDED LIGHT

Seeded Light (Turning Point Books, 2010) is Edward Byrne's sixth collection of poetry. The refined poems of this volume invite the reader into a spacious world . . .

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About "One Poet's Notes"

"One Poet's Notes" presents ongoing personal commentary by a poet/editor about contemporary poetry, fiction, and criticism, as well as various other issues relating to the literary arts, and it is intended to complement content in the semiannual publications, Valparaiso Poetry Review and Valparaiso Fiction Review.

Collections selected for discussion in this editor's blog include distinguished works published in the last few years by small presses, university presses, or major publishing houses.

Edward Byrne

About Me

Edward Byrne is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently a trilogy of volumes: TIDAL AIR (Pecan Grove Press, 2002), SEEDED LIGHT (Turning Point Books, 2010), and TINTED DISTANCES (Turning Point Books,2011). DARK REFUGE (2011), an audio chapbook offering a sequence of poems from AUTISM: A POEM, is available from Whale Sound. He has also edited two anthologies of poetry, including POETRY FROM PARADISE VALLEY (Pecan Grove Press, 2010). In addition, his essays of literary criticism have been published in various journals and book collections, including MARK STRAND (Chelsea House Publishers), edited by Harold Bloom; A CONDITION OF THE SPIRIT: THE LIFE AND WORK OF LARRY LEVIS (Eastern Washington University Press), edited by Christopher Buckley and Alexander Long; “Claudia Emerson: Literary Criticism” in POETRY FOR STUDENTS (Thomson Gale Publishing), edited by Ira Mark Milne; and DAVID BOTTOMS: CRITICAL ESSAYS AND INTERVIEWS (McFarland & Co.), edited by William Walsh. He is a professor in the English Department at Valparaiso University, where he serves as editor of VALPARAISO POETRY REVIEW and co-editor of VALPARAISO FICTION REVIEW.
Contact: Edward.Byrne@Valpo.Edu

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Each week One Poet's Notes will try to highlight work by a poet selected from the issues of Valparaiso Poetry Review. According to the children's rhyme, "Tuesday's child is full of grace." Therefore, graceful poems from VPR's issues will be featured on Tuesdays except when other posts with news or updates preempt the usual appearance of this item.